Je tu il elle

Chantal Akerman's Je tu il elle opened in 1974 — Akerman's first feature, made the year before Jeanne Dielman at the age of twenty-four. The film entered the Sight & Sound critics' poll's upper tier in 2022, alongside Akerman's better-known masterpiece, and has since become a foundational work in the broader feminist and lesbian cinema canon. The film was made on an extremely limited budget; Akerman herself plays the lead.

The film unfolds in three movements. In the first, Akerman's character is alone in a bare Brussels apartment, eating sugar from a paper bag and writing and rewriting a letter she will not send, across what is broadly several days of self-imposed isolation. In the second she is on the road, hitchhiking in the cab of a truck driver (Niels Arestrup, in his very early career, before his subsequent French-cinema lead-roles work), and the chapter unfolds in a register of accumulated observational silence. In the third she arrives at the apartment of a former female lover (Claire Wauthion) and they spend a night together.

Akerman's commitment to long static takes, the absence of conventional plot, and the central body of her own performance — distant, observant, occasionally uncomfortable — produced a film of unusual formal seriousness for the period. The third-movement intimacy is one of the most-discussed cinematic representations of female sexuality of the 1970s. The film is widely cited as foundational to the European-feminist-cinema tradition that Jeanne Dielman would extend the following year.